Stop work on Coastal Road, HC tells BMC

Quashes CRZ clearance granted by Ministry of Environment and Forest; says there has been complete lack of a scientific study.

Observing that there was a ‘lack of scientific study’ on the environmental impact of the Rs 14,000-cr Mumbai Coastal Road project, the Bombay High Court has set aside the Costal Regulatory Zone Clearance granted by various regulatory authorities, and ordered the BMC to stop work with immediate effect.

This order comes as a huge jolt to the BMC’s ambitious 29.2-km long freeway which was to run along Mumbai’s western coastline starting from the Princess Street flyover on Marine Drive, moving northward in a tunnel beneath Malabar Hill and Nepean Sea Road, then up towards Priyadarshani Park where land would be reclaimed till the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, before ending in Versova.

A division bench comprising Chief Justice Pradeep Nadrajog and Justice NM Jamdar passed their order on a clutch of PILs and held that the permissions granted by the Maharashtra Coastal Zone Management Authority (MCZMA) and the Expert Appraisal Committee (EAC) of the Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF) in 2017 are ‘illegal’.

According to the order, the MCZMA didn’t even bother to record the objections to the project raised by NGOs, while the EAC simply did ‘lip service to the requirement of law’ by noting objections and BMC’s comments and not giving reasons for their findings.

At the inception of the project in 2011, the state had appointed an 11-member Joint Technical Committee (JTC), headed by the Municipal Commissioner, to consider whether a coastal road was the solution to Mumbai’s traffic woes. The team, which included the director of the National Institute of Oceanography (CSIR/NIO), was also meant to check if the project would have an impact on the tide and tidal circulation as the BMC would require to reclaim 90 hectare of land, only 20 of which would be used for the road.

In the December 2011 report, the JTC opined that environmental impact on the tides or erosion of the coastline would be minimal. The HC bench, however, noted that throughout the arguments the findings of the team at CSIR-NIO were not mentioned.

The petitioners – Shweta Wagh, Worli fishermen, Conservation Action Trust, Vanashakti, Society for Improvement, and Greenery and Nature (SIGN) – have slammed the Coastal Road project since they first appealed against it. Their main objection was that the BMC is implementing the project with faulty, illegal green clearance. Most of the petitioners, through senior counsels Janak Dwarkadas and Gayatri Singh, argued that the project lacks a mandatory prior environmental clearance under the Environmental Impact Assessment Notification of 2006.

BMC’s special counsel Darius Khambata argued that all permissions and clearances are in place with two independent studies by the BMC on environment impact assessment and social impact assessment. He said the BMC had given a map to the HC outlining the areas where reclamation was necessary. The EAC had thrown its weight behind the project and granted clearance, observing that “denying the project CRZ clearance will not serve any public interest, as, in the long run, the social benefits outweigh the marginal impact likely to be incurred on the environmental aspects”.

The bench said, “...where from the opinion was recorded that the likely impact on the environment would be marginal. Not a fact arising out of the material before it has been discussed by the committee and thus it is a case of a conclusion sans any reasons.”

The Rs 14,000-cr coastal road project was first mooted in 2011 and given green clearance in 2017